Il faut se moquer

May 2, 2013

There is a trite and obvious thing to say about Iceland, and that is that it looks like the moon. Descending into the Keflavik lava fields the other day, on an Icelandair flight from Paris, I was permitted to feel annoyed and a bit superior when I overheard the virgin French tourists behind me exclaiming as they gawked at the land below: Mais il n'y a rien là! By 'nothing' I thought perhaps they had meant 'no Michelin stars', but then one of them added, as if on cue: C'est comme la lune! Yet if there is an association between the earth's only satellite and this basalt outcropping of the mid-Atlantic range that is too obvious to mention, there is another that remains to this day far too occult, and that is as deserving of notice as the other is of suppression.

The great German astronomer and natural philosopher Johannes Kepler, most famous for defending the Copernican system and for establishing the elliptical orbit of planets, began his 1634 Somnium (sometimes subtitled A Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy) as follows:

My name is Duracotus. My country is Iceland, which the ancients called Thule. My mother was Fiolxhilde. Her recent death freed me to write, as I had long wished to do. While she lived, she carefully kept me from writing. For, she said, the arts are loathed by many vicious people who malign what their dull minds fail to understand, and make laws harmful to mankind. Condemned by these laws, not a few persons have perished in the chasms of Hekla.

The narrator goes on to describe his mother's commercial undertakings in what might be euphemistically called 'folk medicine', or, slightly more bluntly, 'natural magic':

In the earliest years of my boyhood my mother, leading me by the hand and sometimes hoisting me up on her shoulders, often used to take me up to the lower slopes of Mt. Hekla. These excursions were made especially around St. John's Day, when the sun is visible all twenty-four hours, and there is no night. Gathering some herbs with many rites, she cooked them at home. She made little bags out of goatskin, which she filled and carried to a nearby port to sell to the ship captains. This is how she earned her living.

That Kepler decides to preface what turns out to be a fairly serious work of lunar astronomy --to wit, a theoretical reflection upon the conditions on the still-mythical dark side of the moon-- with this narrative set-up is peculiar, not least because we know, and his contemporaries knew, that it reflects Kepler's own life in significant ways. Kepler's own mother, Katharina Kepler, née Guldenmann (1546-1622), was in the years leading up to the Somnium's composition being held in prison in Stuttgart on suspicion of witchcraft, under threat of imminent torture and execution. The son fought for years for his mother's release, and eventually won it, but much of their life was spent in the frenetic uncertainty of the Hexenjagd. Kepler was concerned with witchcraft not only as a source of fanciful characters for his thin fictions.

And yet, this bit of biography in no way helps us to answer the question: Why Iceland?

Duracotus cuts open one of his mother's little bags, and the herbs and runes come falling out. In a rage, she sells the little boy to a ship captain, and he sails off to the Danish island of Hven, where he eventually falls into an apprenticeship under the great Tycho Brahe, who instructs Duracotus first in Danish, then in astronomy. From the beginning, the displaced Icelander notices the similarity between his new learning and the traditions embodied by his own mother:

I was delighted beyond measure by the astronomical activities, for Brahe and his students watched the moon and the stars all night with marvelous instruments. This practice reminded me of my mother, because she, too, used to commune with the moon constantly.

Duracotus eventually returns to Iceland and is reunited with Fiolxhilde. Upon reuniting, they engage in an exhaustive exchange of information about their respective traditions. The Icelandic witch is happy to learn the latest science from the continent, and her son, in turn, is just as pleased to finally be indoctrinated into native secrets, "those arts among a people so remote from all the others." Fiolxhilde relates her wisdom as follows:

Advantages have been conferred, Duracotus my son, not only on all those other regions to which you went but also on our country, too. To be sure, we are burdened with cold and darkness and other discomforts, which I feel only now, after I have learned from you about the salubriousness of other lands. But we have plenty of clever persons. At our service are very wise spirits, who detest the bright light of the other lands and their noisy people. They long for our shadows, and they talk to us intimately. Among them there are nine chief spirits. Of these, one is especially known to me. The very gentlest and most innocuous of all, he is evoked by one and twenty characters. By his help I am not infrequently whisked in an instant to other shores, whichever I mention to him... Most of the things which you saw with your own eyes or learned by hearsay or absorbed from books, he related to me just as you did.

This spirit, it turns out, specializes in organizing trips to 'the island of Levania', which lies 'fifty thousand German miles up in the ether', and which is, evidently, nothing other than the moon. Fiolxhilde goes on, channeling the spirit, to explain how the lunar voyage unfolds:

The road to it from here or from it to this earth is seldom open. When it is open, it is easy for our kind, but for transporting men it is assuredly most difficult and fraught with the greatest danger to life... Great as the distance is, the entire trip is consummated in four hours at the most... Because the opportunity is so fleeting, we take few human beings along, and only those who are most devoted to us. Some man of this kind, then, we seize as a group and all of us, pushing from underneath, lift him up into the heavens. In every instance the take-off hits him as a severe shock, for he is hurled just as though he had been shot aloft by gunpowder to sail over mountains and seas. For this reason at the outset he must be lulled to sleep immediately with narcotics and opiates. His limbs must be arranged in such a way that his torso will not be torn away from his buttocks nor his head from his body, but the shock will be distributed among his individual limbs. Then a new difficulty follows: extreme cold and impeded breathing. The cold is relieved by a power which we are born with; the breathing, by applying damp sponges to the nostrils. After the first stage of the trip is finished, the passage becomes easier. At that time we expose their bodies to the open air and remove our hands. Their bodies roll themselves up, like spiders, into balls which we carry along most entirely by our will alone, so that finally the bodily mass proceeds toward its destination of its own accord. But this onward drive is of very little use to us, because it is too late. Hence it is by our will, as I said, that we move the body swiftly along, and we forge ahead of it from now on lest it suffer any harm by colliding very hard with the moon When the humans wake up, they usually complain about an indescribable weariness of all their limbs, from which they later recover well enough to walk.

Fortunately, like some Laurence Sterne or DFW who can never be happy or finished with his work, Kepler provides us with his own explanatory notes on the Somnium, which are significantly more lengthy than the work itself. And he does not shy away from the question we've been circling around, Why Iceland? He begins by noting that "in our German language," 'Island' means 'Ice Land'." But, he continues, the real reason for choosing it is the power it seems to hold of inducing a state of rêverie:

In this remote island I perceived a place where I might fall asleep and dream, in imitation of the philosophers in this branch of literature. For Cicero crossed over into Africa when he was getting ready to dream. Moreover, in the same western ocean Plato fashioned Atlantis, whence he summoned imaginary aids to military valor.

But still, why Iceland in particular, rather than the distant lands selected by his classical predecessors? Kepler supposes Plutarch had already discussed Iceland in his On the Face of the Moon from the 1st century CE, though he insists that this had nothing to do with his own choice. This choice, if we are to take Kepler at his word, turns out to be fairly uninteresting, a contingent result of a contingent choice of an obscure publisher to collate the plots of unrelated stories into a single volume. He writes of his sojourn in Bohemia:

At that time there was for sale in Prague Lucian's book about the trip to the moon, as translated into the German language by Rollenhagen's son; bound with it were the stories of St. Brendan and St. Patrick's Purgatory in the earth beneath Mt. Hekla, the Icelandic volcano. Moreover, since Plutarch, in accordance with the belief of pagan theology, located the purgatory of souls on the moon, I decided that when I set out for the moon I would most prefer to take off from Iceland.

My thesis here, if I must have one, is that there is more to the story than this. The association between Iceland and lunar voyages runs deeper than some editorial caprice of Georg Rollenhagen fils. For one thing, we know that Kepler was reading other books, which can be shown to have had a significant influence on the content of the Somnium. In particular, the 16th-century Swedish minister and polymath Olaus Magnus's Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (Rome, 1555) seems to have been particularly important. Magnus refers to the "artem magicam apud septentrionales populos" (Bk. 3, Ch. 15, 117), a phrase which Kepler subsequently picks up virtually unaltered. According to Edward Rosen, "Kepler's use of the words montis... ignivomi to describe Mt. Hekla as the site of Purgatory strikingly echo" the terminology of the 1599 abridgement of Magnus's Historia.

In fact, when we look at the entire passage on Iceland to which Rosen refers, we can plainly see that Kepler is relying on Magnus not just for his picture of Mt. Hekla, but also for much of Fiolxhilde's later account of the Icelandic spirits that, as she puts it, 'love the shadows'. Allow me to cite the passage at some length:

The land of Iceland is situated beneath the Arctic pole, oriented principally toward the northwest, and close to the glacial sea: and this is why it merits the name of 'Ice Land', or 'Ultima Thule', celebrated among the ancients... For the greater part it is mountainous and wild, above all towards the northern coast, for nor does the austere vent of the aforementioned northwesterly wind permit anythng to grow. The island is known for its unheard-of wonders. And indeed the rocks, or the promontory in them, ... are seething with a perpetual fire like Mt. Etna. And it is in that place that the punishment and expiation of besmirched souls is believed to occur. One finds there spirits, or shadows, that are manifested through the conjurations of men. The specters of drowned men or of men who died a violent death appear so real that, like living men, they shake hands with men who don't know they are dead, and the error does not reveal itself until the moment when the specters have disappeared ('De apparentibus umbris submersorum', Bk. II, ch. 3, 62).

It is, in short, even more clear than it had been for Rosen, when we look at this entire passage, that Kepler is greatly indebted to Magnus, and not just for his appreciation of Hekla as a point of entry to a nether-realm, but also as an inspiration for the idea that Iceland is a place of commerce with spirits.

But we are still missing something very important: the sort of transit Kepler describes as happening from Iceland is not a descent into a dark nether world. Iceland as a point of entry to the center of the world is of course a familiar trope, as for instance in Jules Verne, whose 1864 Voyage au centre de la Terre begins with the deciphering of a supposed runic manuscript that describes where the volcanic points of entry lie. The idea that Iceland possesses such points of entry appears to be rooted both in the geology of the mid-Atlantic range, as well as in Norse mythology itself. Thus in the Gylfaginning, which makes up the first part of Snorri Sturluson's 13th-century Prose Edda, there is mention of the Gjallarbrú, a bridge across the River Gjöll into Hel (a place that is what it sounds like). But the Gjallarbrú has its symbolic inversion in the Asbrú, or Æsir Bridge, which does not descend into the bowels of the earth, but rather extends from this world into Asgard, the realm of the gods. An alternative term for 'Asbrú' is 'Bifröst' (as found in the Prose Edda) or 'Bilröst' (as found in the Poetic Edda). These terms can all serve, even in contemporary Icelandic, as poetic or elevated ways of saying 'rainbow': a bridge that leads to the æsir, the gods. Thus in the Grímnismál, a component of the Poetic Edda, we find a concealed Odin revealing cosmological knowledge to Agnarr, who learns that the Asbrú is the best of all bridges, even if it is constantly burning up those who cross it:

Or, in Benjamin Thorpe's 19th-century translation: "Körmt and Ormt, and the Kerlaugs twain: / these Thor must wade each day, / when he to council goes / at Yggdrasil's ash / for as the As-bridge is all on fire, / the holy waters boil."

There is no sign in Magnus, or any of Kepler's known sources, of an understanding of the commerce wth spirits in Iceland as initiating a flight rather than a descent. There is little indication of any interest in the Historia in the arcana of Norse mythology, and if it is to this latter that we ultimately wish to trace Kepler's Somnium, from the lunar voyage back to the burning bridge of the Æsir, scholarly prudence requires us to concede that we have yet to discover the path by which this trope was transmitted from medieval Iceland to early modern Germany.

What can be established is that in Iceland, as a result of the coincidence of its geological features with its geographical situation, we find the confluence of two widespread and ancient mythological tropes. Its vulcanism marks it out as a site of access to Hades or Hel, while its Arctic location causes it to be associated with another world not beneath but above or beyond this one-- we see the Arctic being used for exactly this purpose in, e.g., Margaret Cavendish's conception of a 'blazing world' that attaches to this one at the North Pole, and in the many subsequent iterations of the idea that 'Nova Zembla', as it was long called in quaint misunderstanding (and where, good maps show, there is a river called 'Nabokov'), is a site where the ordinary laws of nature break down. Remarkably, both of these tropes are found already in the medieval Eddas, narratively represented by the two bridges, Asbrú and Gjallarbrú, burning and scintillating, dissuading the common lot of men from crossing them.

August 18, 2012

For the latest issue of Cabinet Magazine, devoted to the theme of punishment, I talked to Danielle S. Allen about criminal justice in ancient Athens, the civil rights movement, and the Trayvon Martin case, among other things. To read the entire interview, go here, or, better yet, go buy Issue 46 of Cabinet, in stores now.

Your book The World of Prometheus offers a perfect way of giving historical depth to this issue on punishment, but it may also be interesting to reflect on how punishment in ancient Athens is relevant to our understanding of punishment in the contemporary world and, in particular, in the US. I’ve read both Prometheus and Talking to Strangers, your more recent book on Brown v. Board of Education, and one thing that struck me is how many of the same themes run through both books. You observe in Prometheus that the value of approaching punishment through the Greeks is that we’re able to “sharpen our thinking about punishment on the stone of the unfamiliar ancient world.” Does this remain for you the ultimate reason for studying ancient conceptions of punishment: that it gives us a point of access for understanding the problem of punishment itself by looking at an unfamiliar conception of it?

I can tell you the origin story of the book, which is simply that, as an undergraduate, I took a class on Athenian politics in which we read a lot of the speeches that were given in Athenian law courts. I was really taken aback by the fact that there was very little mention of imprisonment in those speeches, and I suddenly realized that I couldn’t imagine a world where prisons weren’t a major part of how we think about punishment. That captivated me, and I wanted to understand a world where imprisonment was not the dominant mode of understanding punishment. In that regard, the origin of the book was absolutely the shock of discovering, by looking at the ancient world, that our world is contingent, and that one particular contingency is the degree to which we use incarceration. It bears some thinking as to how we got there and what a world without extensive incarceration looks like.

Well, that might be right about our contemporary context; the ancient story is somewhat different. Generally—there are minor exceptions to this—Athenian methods of punishment strove to protect the body of the citizen, and this established a distinction between citizen and slave, between citizen and foreigner, resident alien, and so forth. The citizen stood out as having that bodily protection. In the early phase of the democracy, the main modes of punishing were monetary fines and exile. What happened, though, was that poorer citizens would find themselves imprisoned indefinitely: there were monetary penalties, and you would be thrown into prison until you’d paid them. So imprisonment wasn’t itself a penalty, except that poorer citizens began to have these indefinite periods in prison because they couldn’t actually pay the fine. Imprisonment as a penalty seems to have been developed in order to equalize the penal system, so that poorer citizens could pay with their bodies. In that regard, it was a different approach to the body than the physical punishment used for slaves and foreigners. It wasn’t really so much a matter of chastising or wounding the body, but rather of accepting the idea that the body could stand in for property. That’s what happened at that historical moment: the body became a form of property, and the person could use that property to pay their debts. Only the citizen had such rights and control over his own body [...]

July 11, 2012

[Excerpt of an essay forthcoming in Cabinet Magazine's 10th-anniversary book. To read the full essay, buy the book!]

...A curious thing happens as curiosity is legitimated, over the course of the modern period, through its transformation into what would be called 'science': it is coopted by the state. And so begins the next chapter, the late modern chapter, of curiosity’s history. Murals go up on the sides of public buildings depicting atoms, bridge-builders, men in lab coats. Science becomes conflated with national glory.

This chapter of curiosity’s history dominated most of the 20th twentieth century, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and began its decline only in the past generation. Now the state grows jealous of the curiosity of individuals, seeking not so much to squelch it as simply to channel it for the state's own interests. Every competence must have a license, and every interest an official association. State support easily crosses over into state control, and this is a circumstance in which the true curiosus is unable to thrive.

A telling illustration of the conflict between state science and individual curiosity is given by the life-work of Vladimir Nabokov, who appears to have seen his love of lepidoptery --which yielded up a new bit of Linnean nomenclature: the Nabokovia genus of the order Lepidoptera— precisely as a defiance of the form of life from which he escaped when he fled to Berlin in 1922. Nabokov’s butterflies stand for a celebration of the possibility of a life that includes the non-political. In the circumstances of the early Soviet Union, in which he did not ask to live, attachment to such a possibility itself becomes deeply political.

But what happens when the individual who embodies the state is himself a curiosus? Consider the late Emperor Hirohito’s marine-biological endeavors, which yielded up serious scientific publications. The curiosity of the emperor, demoted from his pre-war status as an incarnate divinity, was coupled with a lifelong indifference to what one might imagine would be the heavily freighted matter of Japan’s role in World War II and the build-up to it.

In 1975, when asked, “Does your majesty feel responsibility for the war itself, including the opening of hostilities?,” the emperor replied: “I can't answer that kind of question because I haven’t thoroughly studied the literature in this field” (1). The Japanese emperor is not an expert on the Japanese empire; he's more interested in marine worms and hydroids. One can’t help but detect in the emperor a fairly selective variety of curiosity, one that is evasively non-political, and very much unlike Nabokov’s defiantly apolitical lepidoptery...

June 19, 2012

In June 2011, US federal Judge Larry A. Burns ruled that the schizophrenic, multiple-murder suspect Jared Lee Loughner could be forcibly medicated for his mental illness by prison doctors. This ruling, however, was made not in the interest of alleviating his distressing symptoms but rather in the interest of pursuing justice, or, as the prosecution would hope, pursuing Loughner’s eventual execution. Only sane people can be found guilty; only sane, guilty people can be executed; and it is only with the aid of antipsychotic drugs that Loughner might be considered sane.

How, now, did it come to this? Obviously, there was a time when raving demon-seers were the most likely to be punished. Possession, lunacy, folly, and feeble-mindedness all provided further incentive for penalization, rather than standing as impediments to it. Yet today we suppose that punishability has something to do with responsibility, which in turn is based on the counterfactual supposition that one could have done differently than one did. Being able to do one thing rather than another, as opposed to just going along with the flow of nature is, of course, something only free beings are capable of doing. And freedom, finally, is a condition of the brain, it is supposed, that can be lost with mental illness, and then restored with drugs.

Must one be sane to be guilty? And must one be guilty to be punished? Bernard Williams reminds us that for the Greeks it was enough to be tainted by miasma, which “was incurred just as much by unintentional as by intentional killing.”The taint was simply the guilt that comes from bad luck rather than consciously wrong action. If this seems a harsh conception of justice, it is important to remember that, civic law aside, we have traditionally imagined that it is the only one that the cosmos respects or knows: they are punished who do the wrong thing at the wrong time, and the determination of wrongness is independent of malicious intention...

June 9, 2012

'Tis with much ﻿﻿Relish Regret that we announce the final and utmost Demise, yea, the certain and irreversible Decline, which the Latins call corruptio and which, being English'd, is the Corruption or Passing-Away of the corporeall Substance; the throwing off of the Mortal Coil, the giving up of the Ghost, the final separation of the immaterial Soule, leaving, where it had once been, naught but a stinking and rotten Corpse; the Departure, the Egress, the Going: yea, I say, the DEATH of Dr. Jus. Smith, FRS, this Tues-Day last at his Home in Dulwich, having succumb'd to the Gout.

He is surviv'd by his Wife, Mary, and a Dozen of Children, not counting three Bastards, a Half-Wit, and one that is evidently a Changeling. His first Wife, Anne, died many years hence under suspicious Circumstances, when she, so 'tis said, slipt upon the Rind of a Fruit of the Mousa Tree, lately call'd by the Hottentotical name of Banana (Dr. Smith had been raising up this Fruit of the Torrid Zone right here in grey England, by means of an oven capable of regulating its own Heat, by the Light of Phosphorus channel'd thro' a powerfull Lamp, and othersuch alchemick Machinations), and she landed, poor Anne did, squarely upon her Skull. The servants present reported a strange comick Effect of this sad Event: tho' distraught to see their Mistress so suddenly despatch'd, they could not help but snicker at the very Improbabilitie of Slipping upon the Rind of this foreign Fruit. Experiments were subsequently perform'd within the Scientifickall Society to determine the precise Cause of the Banana's comœdickall Virtù, tho' we confess it remains to this day a great Mysterium.

Dr. Smith was born a-shipboard on 30 July, 1642, while voyaging to the Isles of Bermuda. He caus'd his own Mother such Birthing-Paines, 'tis said, that two deck-hands jump'd o'er-board just to escape her pitifull Wailing. No good Fortune be-fell that Ship after his Birth either, and soon enough the Capitain found his Vessel wrack'd upon one of those almost imperceptible Sea-rocks form'd entirely of the Droppings of Gulls.

'Tis not known how the infant Smith surviv'd; some say he was given Suck by passing Sirens, others, that he nourisht himself upon the very Droppings that serv'd as his Dwelling. Still others say that the Babe, as if by an inward Impulse, resorted to that unspeakable savage Diet of which the Frenchman Montaigne writes. In any case 'tis clear he surviv'd, some how, 'til some time after he was discover'd there upon the Rocks, surrounded by the Squelettes of his Ship-Mates, by a Crewe of Saracenickal Pirates, who carried him back with them to Foul Barbary.

He was thereupon sold into Slavery, but had the good Fortune to be purchas'd by none other than the Sultan of Fez, who by some unknowable Mahommedan Megrim grew fond of the lad, and determin'd to raise him up steep'd in the Learning of the Mussulmans. He was pair'd with a Tutor, who instructed him not only in the learnèd Books of Avicenna, Averroës, and Algazel, but Aristotelès too, and the other Greeks, of whose Philosophy all the Books of the Arabs are naught but an Echo. When the time came, he was sent to University at Al Caraween, which is call'd in the Arabick Tongue a Madrassa, where he excell'd in the Study of Naturall Philosophy, particularly Meteorology or the doctrine of mixt Bodies, Medicine, Metallurgy, Alchemy, and perhaps still other Arts, e'en blacker yet.

'Twas on the basis of this Formation that Smith, at the young Age of 26, would later gain Entrance into our Scientifickall Society, when he presented before its Members his newly invented Weather-Engine, which most magnificently display'd all the changes of the Heavens as in a Mikrokosmos: Clouds, Rain, Hail, and Snowe, all contain'd within a translucent glass Globe but three Feet in Diameter, placed upon a Table at the front of our Theatrum anatomicum. 'Tis this very Weather-Globe that would later give rise to the Commerce in inexpensive Snowe-Domes, sold at Faires and before the great Edifices of all Europe, wherein Snowe is made to fall, per exemplum, upon the Cathedral of Our Lady in Paris, with the words inscrib'd underneath: Yea, as this Snowe-Globe doth attest, I have voyag'd to Paris, and regarded its Monuments with my very Eyes.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves, for before his entry into the Society, young Smith had quite a voyage of his own. When at 18 Smith completed his course of Study at Al Caraween, his Master the Sultan determin'd to send him to Padua to further his Medical Formation under the Supervision of the renown'd Andreas Vesalius. But news travels slowly to the Moorish Lands, and by the time Smith arriv'd in Italy, Vesalius (1514-1564) had been long deceas'd: for exactly a Century of Years, in fact.

Tho' he had been an apt Pupil at Fez, in his Italick Sojourn the young Smith show'd but little Promise. With no-one to direct his further Studies, he instead went in for the Giuoco del calcio fiorentino, what is sometimes call'd the Florentine game of Kick, which consists in the mindless Running to-and-fro upon a Field of Grass or e'en Sand, chasing after a hide-bound Ballon, and directing it with the very Feet past the Lines-men & into a netted Goal. From the playing-Field's Edge he was oft heard to cry out along with his dullard Mates, olé! olé!, for an hidden Reason, like some distemper'd Spagnol. What a shamefull Waste of Time! Recently this game of Kick has crossed the Channel into our own Country, and if this is not a Jesuitickall Complot to distract our young Men in their most dynamicall and hopefull Years, then ne'er was thereone in all of England.

With no Master to emulate, Smith quickly grew idle, as oft happens by a sort of Contagion in the Papist Lands around the Middle Sea. The Sultan yearn'd for him to return to Fez, but Smith thought him self fine where he was, and would no doubt have idled there indefinitely, had a chance Encounter with the fair Daughter of the Duke of Modena not chang'd his Fate for ever. The Maiden, having disguis'd her self in the clothing of a commoner, was Strolling with her Governness about the City's Streets. Believing she was as common as he, Smith got it into his Head to offer her a Sweet. You mustn't speak to her! was the Governess's stern reply. Yet he, perhaps by some Moorish perversion of the Art of Syllogism, took this very prohibition upon Speech itself as an Incitement to Action, and so attempted then and there to give the Lady of Modena a bacio profondo straight upon the Mouth.

Within the hour all of the Duke's men had been summon'd to chase this Scoundrel down, and so he ran north, and kept running right o'er the Alps; and he would have run no doubt all the way to the Land of the Hyper-Boreans, had he not remember'd the Story the Sultan told him years ago as a small boy, that his true Parents had come not from the Rocks made of Droppings, but from England. So there he went, and soon was reunited with his Uncle, who had been in search of him e'er since News of the Ship's Wrack arriv'd back home.

His Uncle, the Baron Waldegrave, was an indulgent Man, and arrang'd for Smith to be tutor'd in all things Christian, just as the Sultan had already had him train'd up in all things Gentile. He naturally began with the English Tongue, which to that point had remain'd as foreign to Smith as the Arabick tongue to the common Englishman. The tutor then mov'd on through the basic tenets of the true and reveal'd Christian Faith, disabusing him along the way of the sundry Averroistic heresies that had no doubt been inculcated into him earlier in Life. From there they moved on to the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England, which young Smith learnt by Heart, chasing out (or so his Uncle hoped) the Superstitions of the Alcoran. His most belovèd was Psalm 19, which began: "The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament sheweth his handywork."

But his prior learning among the Gentiles was seen to have some Value, and the Baron encourag'd him to continue his experimentations touching upon Naturall Philosophy. And so he made not just Weather-Globes, but also Shoes that fasten not by laces, but rather by two surfaces that cling mysteriously to one another, which he call'd, no less mysteriously, Velcrum; he extracted Sweet Fluid from the Indian Corn of the Americas, and propos'd to use it for the Sweetening of Beverages; he invented a Box for the recording of spoken Words or music, that could be heard again, as if spoken again, simply by turning a Wheel upon the top of it (tho' he was only able to record the Words, Isaac, you ass! before the machine stoppt working altogether). Since he could not bring the Speech-Engine to present to the Society under such circumstances, it was decided that the Weather-Globe represented his best Hope for gaining Admission. So in the winter of 1668, off he went to London, with the Globe in tow.

In addition to his many fancifull Contraptions, Dr. Smith might in the End be best remember'd for his equally fancifull Speculations in matters metaphysickall. According to his philosophickall System, if it may be so call'd, the World consists in Corpuscules onely, bouncing hither and thither like so many Trucco-Balls. But these little Bodies have not onely Mass, Figure, and Motion, as Descartes held, and Lucretius before him. They have also what Smith call'd Strangeness, which maketh them all different the one from the other. But how they are different, and wherein this Strangeness consists, Smith could in no wise say. Hence the many Accusations against him that he had reintroduc'd the very Occult Qualities his valiant Predecessors had sought to chase out. He claimed moreover that some of these Corpuscules even had a certain Charm, that some were on top of the others, some on the bottom, but not in any meaningful sense of locabilitas or Being in a certain Place. At some point he took to calling these queer Corspuscules by the name of Quarks, which is absurd, since as we all know Quark is nothing if not a variety of Curd Cheese, first identified by Tacitus during his travels among the Germanick Heathens.

We would be remiss of course if we did not mention Dr. Smith's true Calling in this Life, which was the issuing of Quaeries in the Transactions of our Society. Won't you kindly tell me this-or-that about Iceland spar?, he would write. Or, Please explain how it is that the Turks hear the hexasyllabic word Constantinopolis as Istanbul, an exclamation only half its predecessor's Length, syllable-wise. Or, Is it true what we have heard, that in the New World the Empsychosis of the Fœtus begins at the very Conception, rather than after 40 days, as in Europe, and if so, what is the cause of this difference, and how should it influence the practice of the vulgar art of Midwifery? And other such Quaeries of no Consequence whatsoever, Quaeries that matter'd not at all to the Advancement of Science, but onely insofar as they satisfy'd Dr. Smith's queer, scatter-brain'd, and bottomless Curiositie.

In his last Will and Testament, Smith requested that all but a small Allowance for Mary and the Children go to his faithfull Amanuensis, Mr. Isaac Molesworth (no Pittance, either, thanks to the Revenues from all those Snowe-Globes). Furthermore, Smith added, "Mr. Molesworth is to inherit my Membership in the Society. Although this is not an usual Practice, as Members are elected in and not will'd in, you will need only to ask Mr. Molesworth to demonstrate his Search-Engine, which will surely put Squibb's Sub-Aquatick River-Vessel to shame (sic!), in order to be assur'd of his Worthiness."

'Twas said of old that no Man may be call'd happy 'til he dies. Is Dr. Smith, then, happy? He is dead, that much is certain. His Life seems to have involv'd much Going-about, many fancifull Inventions, and much Holding-Forth upon this topic and that. But wherefore? And to what End? These are perhaps the final Quaeries that will accompany Dr. Smith, or at least the Soul of him, as he goes to meet his All-Knowing Creator, whose very Being is it self the Answer to every Quaerie e'er sent out into the Republick of Letters, nay, e'er dreamt up by mortal Men.

Abraham Squibb, FRS

7 March, 1711

*

This concludes the Quaeries series. To read the earlier installments, please go here.

January 24, 2011

I've already mentioned that this coming Superbowl Sunday is going to be one of the best I've ever spent: I'll be busy talking about hair with a bunch of effete Brooklynites.

Quite independently of my preparation for this debut as a hair counsellor, I have just happened upon a number of references to an important chapter in our capillary history that has previously quite escapted my attention. I am speaking here of the plica polonica, which was long thought to be an illness, most commonly diagnosed in Poland, whose primary symptom was matted, clumpy, dreadlock-like hair.

I first came across a reference to the Polish plait in François Bernier's 1669 letter to Jean Chapelain, written from Shiraz in Persia, describing the appearance and practices of the yogis he had seen during his sojourn in India: "There are some [yogis] who have hair that falls to half-way down their thigh, and that is matted into branches like the massive hairs of our water-dogs, or rather like the hair of those who suffer from the illness from Poland that we call the 'Polish plait'. I saw in many places ones who held an arm, and sometimes both arms, elevated and stretched continually above their heads."

I was quickly able to turn up a number of medical treatises, mostly from the 19th century, that identify the Polish plait variously as 'a sort of trichoma', a 'strange illness' or a 'hair disorder'. The 1834 Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine informs us that its frequencey in Poland results from a long tradition, going back to the 11th century, of wearing the hair "after the manner of the Tartar and some Indian tribes," namely, in "a single tuft of hair being left to grow from the top of the scalp." The poorer inhabitants of Poland, "being wretchedly lodged and clothed, and exposed to the combined injurious influence of a marshy soil and a damp variable climate, the general cutaneous exhalation is at all times below the healthy standard, and ... hence arises the greatly increased gowrth of this portion of the hair, and the unnatural quantity of viscid secretion which is at the same time thrown out."

Now by now you are surely thinking: how could there be an illness of the hair? If it clumps, or split ends emerge, or any other such salonfähig problem arises, it can simply be cut off. This is a concern for beauticians, not physicians. Or is it? The author of the Cyclopaedia entry tells of a patient, a boy of about fifteen years of age, who "lay in a most filthy state, and his black hair, knotted long and matted together, gave out an intolerable stench." It is related that the Polish phyisician in attendance strongly opposed the possibility of "cutting off the hair, on the ground that the humour exuded on the hair might turn in on the brain and cause apoplexy."

Lest we presume that this is just a problem of the benighted past, it should be noted that there is an article in a medical journal from March, 2000, bearing the title "Plica polonica in the 21st Century." The abstract, translated haltingly from the German, reads as follows:

We describe a young man presenting with dreadlocks. There are remarkable similarities with the so called plica polonica, that historically had been treated with long courses of mercury. Apparently very important in the 18th century, the interest for this hair-disorder appears to be lost in specialized medical literature. In contrast dreadlocks, a recent hairstyle are frequently encountered. Lack of other sources various websites provide dermatologists with answers to questions regarding complications. Fortunately a simply haircut is today treatment enough.

Now I had put this curiosity behind me until by chance this evening I stumbled across the intriguely titled 1653 book of Thomas Hall, the Comarum akosmiai: The Loathsomnesse of Long Haire: or, A Treatise Wherein you have the Question stated, many Arguments against it produc'd, and the most materiall Arguments for it refell'd and answer'd, with the concurrent judgement of Divines both old and new against it. With an Appendix against Painting, Spots, Naked Breasts, &c.

I hope to be able to get back to that last part of the title soon, but what jumped out at me given my recent encounters with this strange diagnosis was the dedicatory poem, "To the Long-hair'd Gallants of these Times." It begins with some delightful couplets:

Go Gallants to the Barbers, go

Bid them your hairy Bushes mow.

God in a Bush did once appeare,

But there is nothing of him here.

And so on. But then already by the fifteenth line or so we are told of the horrible wrath a vengeful God has let loose on Poland:

Have you not been inform' o'th' hand

Of God on Poland lately laid;

Enough to make all Lands afraid,

And your long dangles stand an end?

Feare him that did that Plica send,

And those sad Crawlers: and hath more

Unheard of Judgements still in store.

It's interesting in this connection, and I won't dwell at length here, to reflect on the semiotics of dreadlocks in the Euro-American sphere. They are supposed to come from Jamaica, and to be a transposition of a hairstyle 'naturally' suited to African heads onto heads that can only cultivate them with great effort. But we see here that the dreadlock in the European imagination originally came from Poland, or, rather, from a country on the Eastern frontier of Europe that had allowed itself to be influenced by the barbarian practices of the Tartars of deepest Eurasia: the nomads who ate raw meat and drank blood. I suspect that the association of matted hair with the Afro-Caribbean and African-American cultural sphere is itself the transposition of prejudices that are much more deeply rooted than most will ever know.

January 23, 2011

All I ever wanted to do was to write, but my Cabinet colleagues think writing is better in combination with events. So if you are in the New York area next week please do come to the Brooklyn Flea to hear me, along with a wonderful panel of distinguished speakers, speaking about hair. Well, not so much hair, really, as the idea of hair, but of course you already knew that.

Designed to encourage an informal, social, and open mode of learning, Cabinet's series of "fairs for knowledge" aims to create bridges between specialists and the general public by providing unusual venues for short one-on-one discussions between an expert and a member of the general public. In this first installment, six writers will be seated at special tables placed between the regular stalls of the Brooklyn Flea and be ready to engage the public in conversation on a topic that occupies our minds a great deal but is considered too lowly to be worthy of serious reflection—hair.

Come and brush up on “hair plucking” among anxious captive animals; Mary Magdalene’s hair as described in the Bible; fashion, hairdos, and underwear; hairlessness as a signifier of rationality in the history of philosophy; the exceptional hairstyles of rock stars; shaved women and the symbolic loss of power in the French revolution; and more!

To read more about Villa Gillet, click here. To read more about the Walls and Bridges program, click here.

This event has been supported by Villa Gillet and Conseil de la Création Artistique. Special thanks to Eric Demby and the Brooklyn Flea.

November 22, 2010

The beginning of the modern age is heralded by the discovery of the New World, whose human inhabitants were principally noteworthy for their custom, real or imagined, of eating other humans. Scarcely had Columbus returned from his first encounter with the Arawaks of Hispaniola when this point of apparent cultural difference became for European moralists the centerpiece of their search for the ultimate grounds of morality and for the causes of the diversity of moral systems. The figure of the cannibal, in this sense, plays a leading role in the emergence of early modern moral and political philosophy.

The Romanian philosopher and political scientist Cătălin Avramescu is the first scholar to notice the importance of the cannibal in modern European thought, and to attempt to write a comprehensive intellectual history of anthropophagy. His book first appeared in Romanian in 2003 under the title Filozoful crud (“the cruel philosopher” or “the raw philosopher,” depending on context), and in 2009 was published by Princeton University Press as An Intellectual History of Cannibalism. In June 2010, Justin E. H. Smith spoke with Avramescu in Bucharest about, among other things, the difficulty of intellectualizing such a bloody topic as this. This interview was subsequently fleshed out in a series of e-mail exchanges.

May 10, 2010

In Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 Mason &
Dixon, Charles Mason Sr., the father of one of the two great
American
explorers, claims to believe

that bread is alive,—that the
yeast Animalcula may unite into a single purposeful individual,—that
each Loaf is so organized, with the crust, for example, serving as skin
or Carapace,—the small cavities within exhibiting a strange complexity,
their pale Walls, to appearance smooth, proving, upon magnification,
to be made up of even smaller bubbles, and, one may presume, so forth,
down to the Limits of the Invisible. The Loaf, the indispensible point
of convergence upon every British table, the solid British Quartern
Loaf, is mostly, like the Soul, Emptiness.

Is bread in fact like the soul? It is
well known that our own word for the biotic condition does not descend
from the same distinguished Indo-European lineage as bios,
vita, vie, and so on. Instead life, along with the
related Germanic cognates such as Leben
and leven, took the place of bios
and its variations thanks to the intervention of the humble loaf,
which originally had none of the connotation of the verb “to loaf,”
but had instead only to do with bread. Indeed, loaf is a cognate
of the Russian word for bread, khleb, and also of the Gothic
hlaif. At some point, then, and I really do not know when, the
ancient
Germanic tribes started using the word for bread to denote life itself,
since, obviously, bread sustains life, is a condition of life, and thus,
in some primitive way of thinking into which it is not all that hard
to work one’s way back, is life.

It is quite likely that Mason Sr. is
being made by Pynchon to paraphrase a commonplace of what was often
called “chemical philosophy” or “chymistry,” but since the eighteenth
century has been marginalized as mere alchemy: the primitive, irrational
ancestor of chemistry. Chymistry, or alchemy, or whatever you wish to
call it, had as one of its central goals the isolation of the “essences”
or “spirits” of things through laboratory means such as distillation.
In Johann Agricola’s Chymische Medicin
of 1638, for example, we are given practical advice for the distillation
of spirit out of flesh, blood, sugar, and, of all things, bread. The
spiritus panis, which Agricola describes as a vapor that remains
in the glass bubble of the alembic after the alchemist has performed
his operations, is a sort of “pure bread,” or bread reduced down
to its very essence. It is to bread what my immortal soul is to me.